Managing Information Using IMSMANG
IMSMANG divides information management into three successive phases: recording, analysing and reporting. Each phase consists of different tasks that are performed using IMSMANG toolset. After an information manager decides how to customise IMSMANG for their organisation, the system administrator sets up the toolset using the instructions in this guide. The figure below shows the flow through the phases along with a brief description of the tasks performed in each.
Contents
Recording
In the first and most important phase of information management, field officers enter a variety of details about an area, activity or event, otherwise known as an item, into IMSMANG using data entry forms called field report templates. To ensure the right information is recorded, system administrators build and manage the field report templates and their item attributes, or portions of information to record for each type of item. IMSMANG provides a set of default templates with standard item attributes that system administrators can modify, or system administrators can build and publish custom templates with custom item attributes for the field officers to use. System administrators also set up and manage the country structure information and basic programme data, including explosive ordnance, organisation and place data, that field officers use when completing field report templates.
Analysing
An effective information management system enables an information manager to examine a large amount of data efficiently and make decisions that support their programme’s objectives. IMSMANG provides three customisable sets of tools for visualising and analysing mine action data and the tasks related to mine action activities. Themes enable users to display image-based information on the map, including icons to identify the location of an item by its type, high- resolution satellite images and topographic details. And current view windows display a text- based summary of all the information entered into the system about an item or task. Working with their information managers, system administrators can customise these tools to display mine action data to suit the needs of the programme. System administrators can also design impact scoring templates, which enable the organisation to measure and report how much a location is affected by explosive ordnance.
Reporting
In the final phase of information management, field officers compile mine action data and run a variety of reports for sharing information. Like IMSMANG’s other tools, the reports are customisable and stored as templates in the system so field officers can run the same reports as often as needed without compiling new information each time. To support this work, system administrators create search definitions with most or all search criteria predefined and report templates for each item to report on, the attributes to be included, custom calculations that can be performed on the returned data if applicable and how the data should be formatted.